1 - Introduction

Summary

The introduction sets the scene for Articulating Security, providing a snapshot of post-Millennium global security under the aegis of the United Nations, and focusing on the organization’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. It explains that the principal intervention the book makes is to show that, even though this managerial security strategy has not been very effective in countering security threats, it is not without effect: specifically, it is affecting the ability of law to speak out against injustice. The Introduction sets out the three key interventions made in the book. First, it transplants Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power to a globalized and flexibilized twenty-first-century context. Second, it introduces the book’s key idea of infra-law, a concept that makes sense of the relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. Finally, it presents law with a stark choice between articulating security and articulating justice, arguing that law must relocate its force from authority to anger if it is to serve those rendered insecure by security measures.